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Multilingual Commons is the blog of the Center for Language Study at Yale University. It showcases events, topics, and opinions of interest to the second language teaching and learning community at Yale, and features writing by staff and language faculty.

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In the current (March/April 2016) issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine, David Zax, YC '06, covers how Yale is adapting to the 'digital revolution' in teaching and learning. The article, entitled "The digital evolution of teaching at Yale," also briefly mentions the Center for Language Study's Shared Course Initiative: Improving the Yale learning experience is a…

For those of you who are interested in the activities of CALICO, the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium, we're re-posting a recent update message to members from the group's president, Phil Hubbard. Happy 2016 CALICO members and friends! I thought I would take this opportunity to let you know what your Executive Board and some other…

I just came across a useful article by William Fenton in PC Mag, reflecting on future trends in online education in light of happenings at the recent Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning-organized Learning With MOOCs II conference: "Online Education: The Year Ahead" While the article has helpful summaries of topics and trends (as well…

On Tuesday, April 21, Angie Gleason, Minjin Hashbat, and Dave Malinowski of the CLS joined dozens and dozens of Yale faculty and staff welcoming hundreds of prospective freshmen and their parents to information tables in Payne Whitney Gym, part of the university's annual Bulldog Days. Present also were many of the dedicated language faculty at…

The Yale Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), in partnership with the Bass Library and ITS, is offering two sets of 20 iPad Airs (32GB, WI-Fi-only) and two sets of 20 iPad Minis (16GB, WI-Fi-only) for instructional use during both 2015 summer sessions. Yale faculty members interested in using the iPads for either of the…

This semester’s technology events program kicked off last Tuesday, Jan. 23rd, with 10-minute Tech Talks–short, informal presentations or conversations by language instructors about a technology-related innovation, application, or question, with time for feedback and discussion with peers. In particular, this opening session asked presenters to share tools and technologies they’re curious about or have just begun exploring, or to reflect on ways in which they apply familiar technologies to serve particular instructional and learning needs in their classes.

Sarab Al Ani began with a challenge that she faces in her Arabic classes: how to help students find culturally authentic materials without a huge investment of time and resources on the part of both the student and the teacher? The resource she shared with us was Google Arts & Culture, a project of the Google Cultural Institute to promote the discovery and study of cultural works of art. In addition to searching for works of art by artist, genre, medium, place, historic events and figures, Sarab mentioned that students can tag particular works as personal favorites (try it here), and also create, curate and share folders with items on their own, or in teams.

The second talk was given by Anna Iacovella, who shared activities she conducts with YouTube music videos in her Italian classes, spanning more form-focused cloze-style activities (having students identify uses of the future tense in a song, for instance), to discussions and activities about the rich cultural representations in these videos. As in Sarab’s tech talk, the great opportunities (and a few risks) of bringing authentic materials to the classroom–and inviting the students to find and bring their own for sharing–were at the forefront of this discussion.

Krystyna Illakowicz gave the third tech talk, reflecting on how her experience teaching a Polish class via room-to-room videoconferencing in 2015 (part of the Yale-Columbia-Cornell Shared Course Initiative) has continued to inform the way she uses technology in her traditional face-to-face classrooms. She wrote,

One practice that relates to my distance learning class I taught a few years ago is using the smart board techniques in the classroom without a smart board. I noticed that during my distance learning classes (Advanced Polish L5) the students liked using the smartboard. The class entailed quite a lot of writing and we workshopped students’ texts projecting them on the smartboard. We discussed vocabulary, grammar, and stylistic issues making the corrections right on the smartboard. The students told me, and I could see that myself, how they enjoyed working that way, because the collaborative effort and engagement with technology must have made the “correction” process more enjoyable and that type of engagement with their texts helped them to remember the grammar forms or new words better.

Later, when teaching my regular Advanced Polish without a smartboard, I started projecting student texts via email and we worked on student texts in a similar way as in the divided classroom. Perhaps the smartboard fun is missing, but the effects are similar.

That kind of class work could, of course, be done without a prior smart board experience, but it was the smartboard technology that lead me to such a solution and, as David noticed, it would not become so obvious without a smart board. The smartboard became a kind of a bridge or platform for thinking about such ideas and in some way enabled us to “domesticate” some technological solutions and made them a part of our daily practice.

Have you tried using these or other tools in your classrooms, or want to talk about how you might? Leave a comment below and let’s trade ideas.